Susanna Coffey

Susanna J. Coffey (born 1949) is an American artist and educator. She is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York City.^[1] She was elected a member the National Academy of Design in 1999.^[2]

Coffey was born in New London, Connecticut in 1949. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree magna cum laude from the University of Connecticut in 1977 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Art in 1982.^[3]

Coffey's work investigates normative values of beauty and gender asking questions like "What is a beautiful appearance? Why do conventionally gendered images involve caricature? Can inchoate feeling-states be adequately portrayed?"^[3]

Coffey is best known for her paintings of heads―often self-portraits, such as her Self Portrait, Versace (Canal) Scarf in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Like many of her paintings, this 1996 self-portrait is a frontal view, lit from behind. Hearne Pardee describes her practice in the Brooklyn Rail:

The sort of self-examination Susanna Coffey has practiced over the past three decades is far from the passive self-absorption often criticized in contemporary media. Her long practice of self-portraiture is an active investigation of cultural forms related to the self. Coffey’s art is one of empirical observation, constantly varied based on the subject she contemplates. Like a teller of tales, she’s assumed varied guises, sometimes under dramatic lighting or extreme points of view, sometimes in flamboyant costumes or exaggerated make-up; she finds constant sources of invention in her own person and in the roles our society asks us to play.^[4]

Coffey's work is held at a wide range of institutions, including Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, Yale University Art Gallery, the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham MA, the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, the Brauer Museum of Art in Valparaiso, Indiana, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art in Honolulu, Hawaii, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the National Academy of Design in New York City, the Rockford Museum in Rockford, Illinois, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina and the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts.^[5]

Susanna Coffey has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Coffey received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Artist x Artist award, a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Aeschylus Medal awarded by the city of Eleusis Greece, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio Program Award. Coffey has received honorary degrees from The University of Connecticut School of Fine Art and the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts.^[5]

• Acoustiguide narration, The National Gallery of Art, on Judith Leyster’s Self Portrait
• Article, “Artists Quarantine With Their Art Collections” Stephen Maine, Hyperallergic, May 23, 2020
• Book, Night Painting, Susanna Coffey MAB Books, editor Brice Brown, a selection of landscape paintings with writings by Dr. Carol Becker, Brice Brown, Jane Coffey, Jane Kenyon, Jennifer Samet and Mark Strand 2019
• Book, 50 Contemporary Women Artists, editors John Goslee and Heather Zises, Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2018
• Two Coats of Paint Interview with Sangram Majumdar
• Review of Elemental by Hearne Pardee The Brooklyn Rail February 2014
• Book, ″In Residence, Contemporary Artists at Dartmouth The Hood Museum of Art″, Dartmouth College, 2014
• Review of From Life by John Yau, Hyperallergic November 25, 2012
• Review of Apophenia by Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe, September 25, 2012
• Review of Nocturne by John Goodrich, City Arts April 3, 2012
• Review of Pavers, City Arts, John Goodrich, January 12, 2011
• Book, ″Selected Contemporary American Figurative Painters″, Editor, Qimin Liu, Tianjin Peoples Fine Arts Publishing House, China, 2010
• Review of Night Paintings 1995-2010, Jeremy Bliss, New City, Chicago, April 22, 2010
• Catalog, ″Artist’s Response: Portraits and Self-Portraits″, from exhibition, Unexpected Reflections: The Portrait Reconsidered at Meridian Gallery, 2009, San Francisco CA, by Terri Cohn
• Review of Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, 1820-2009, The New York Times, Ken Johnson, July 22, 2009
• Article, “Looking at Herself” Kathleen Edgecomb, The New London Day, December 8, 05
• Review of Alpha Gallery show, Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe, November 19, 2004
• Review of Women of the Academy, Ken Johnson, The New York Times, Summer 2003
• Catalog, Susanna Coffey: Recent Work, Strand, Mark, New York, André Emmerich, 2003
• Catalog, Susanna Coffey, Tibor De Nagy Gallery, New York, Tibor De Nagy Gallery, 2001
• Catalog Susanna Coffey, Tibor De Nagy Gallery, 2001 essay by Michael Rooks, Poem, "In Sky" by Susan Wheeler
• Catalog, Susanna Coffey Studio Art Exhibition Program, Dartmouth College, September, 1998 Essays by Michael Rooks and Eileen Myles

• Official website
• Artists Quarantined with Their Art, Hyperallergic June 20th 2020
• Interview with Erica Hess for the podcast I like Your Work
• WYBC Radio Interview: Brainard Carey with Susanna Coffey
• Interview on Gorky's Granddaughter
• Hyperallergic conversation with Susanna Coffey
• Susanna Coffey on Pierre Bonnard
• Catalog from Susanna Coffey's “Going to Ground” at the University of Tulsa
• Why Give a Name to It? by John Yau in Hyperallergic
• An Interview of Susanna Coffey with Rich Fisher on Tulsa Public Radio
• Susanna Coffey Studies the Nature of Portraiture by John Yau in Hyperallergic
• 4 Artists on Expressing Love Through Their Work on Artsy